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AMD Wants To Standardize the External GPU (arstechnica.com)
Soulskill writes: In a recent Facebook post, AMD's Robert Hallock hinted that the company is working on a standardized solution for external GPUs. When people are looking to buy laptops, they often want light, portable machines — but smaller devices often don't have the horsepower to effectively run games. Hallock says, "External GPUs are the answer. External GPUs with standardized connectors, cables, drivers, plug'n'play, OS support, etc." The article points out that the Thunderbolt 3 connector already (kinda) solves this problem, providing up to 40Gbps of bandwidth over a single connector. Still, I find external GPUs intriguing. I like the idea of having a light laptop when I'm moving around, but a capable one when I sit down at home to play a game. It'd also be nice to grab my desktop's GPU when I want to game on my laptop in the living room. Standardization may turn out to be important for GPU-makers if VR ends up taking off. The hardware requirements for those devices are fairly steep, and it'd facilitate adoption if graphics power was more easily expandable.
I haven't bought one in over a decade, and even my most hardcore gaming friends I have don't own one. Also, other than Microsoft employees, I have never met someone that has one of those XBox things. They just aren't selling. How about improving your mobile CPUs before working on something that no one wants now. As usual, AMD is stuck in the past.
Soulskill, didn't you get canned as a Slashdot editor recently? Can you tell us what exactly went down? Was it an amicable separation, if you're willing to send in submissions so soon after? Have you found another job?
What does it take to get canned as a /. editor?
Did he RTFA or go a week without posting a dup?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The External GPU plays perfectly into Microsoft's Continuum strategy or think about a console where you and a CPU double pack, etc.
Seems like trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. The weight of a GPU chip and a couple of extra VRAM chips isn’t going to break anyone’s back. The extra weight on a “gaming laptop” usually comes from the extra battery capacity (to support the power sucking GPU), and the fact that the screen itself is usally on the larger side. Plus whatever “bling” they put to make the case look all cool... Any intelligently designed laptop is going to have a shared heat pipe / cooling system that covers the CPU, GPU, and northbridge, so there’s not much to be saved there. I’d venture that the weight of the connector and cover for it, plus the extra hardware to stiffen up the case around that, etc. is probably going to weigh more than the GPU & RAM plus a little bit of extra heat pipe you’re removing. If you have a laptop with a dual embedded / discreet GPU setup, you can even skip the big battery to run on the lower power GPU normally since gamers are probably plugged into AC when they’re playing on the bigger GPU.
Now... If your goal is to sell people who already own a laptop a new GPU module in a couple of years, that makes sense, at least for AMD.
Does someone have timothy's linkedIn? I'm curious what he actually does for a living. It cannot be this.
Yeah man, that's exactly what i need for my gaming machine.
I need an external GPU. Nothing like playing video games on a portable machine with no airflow and massive overheating, while the batteries go to shit, while increasing the portability of the machine by increasing the amount of shit like cables and external GPUs that i hold with me,
all so i can be a hardcore gamer outside of my fucking house instead of studying/working/socializing. Who the fuck studies/works/socializes outside of the house? Nah man, i don't need that shit, i need muh games and muh duffel bag filled with massive laptop equivalents of gameboy color extensions.
Hey AMD, don't forget to also manufacture a giant red vibrating horse dildo with some of them hardcore edgy gamer tribal designs on it, which is Mountain Dew flavored, and also has glowing leds inside that pulsate and can be programmed via some neat gamer software on the laptop.
Timmy is 8 and lives with his parents. He doesn't need a job.
When he grows up, he's going to make blockbuster movies with his video camera.
I think that it's Hipsters/Millennials who have ruined gaming.
Since they've started getting involved with the industry, we've seen games go from being fun and innovative, like Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake and SimCity were, to being dull, unplayable shitfests that aren't worth our time.
Worse, these Hipsters/Millennials have taken gaming from something that was enjoyable and turned it into a political shitshow with their social justice shenanigans.
This has happened to all of the software that Hipsters/Millennials have gotten involved with.
Their awful ideas and UI "designs" have ruined or tarnished Firefox, GNOME, Windows, iOS, OS X, most web sites, and numerous other software products.
They've also chosen to use the worst programming languages around, including JavaScript, PHP, Ruby and Rust. Now we get to deal with the shitty, slow and unmaintainable code they've written. Since they're so "trendy", they move on to the next fad quickly, forcing everyone else to fix the broken shit they've left behind.
I don't know much about the next generation, but I sure as hell hope that they're able to undo all of the damage that the Hipsters/Millennials have managed to do in such a short time.
guess what
>> It'd also be nice to grab my desktop's GPU when I want to game on my laptop in the living room.
Congratulations: you just invented the home graphics mainframe!
He has a law degree according to his profile. That explains a lot.
I understand external GPU have been possible for a while. And with usb-c and thunderbolt perfectly doable but Intel doesn't want it and won't certify eGPUs on thunderbolt. In a normal market and society this is where competition and regulation steps in favour of consumers and innovation.
Its obvious that LYING OBAMA SHITSTAIN is talking up the economy. As you see, the I_MAXI_PAD has made games into fuckign angry birds. In turn, real games such as Deus Ex 1, which require a brain and have dialogue are gone and ANGRY FAGS and CANDY SHIT CRUSH are what we got.
Now the economy is SHIT and VIDEO GAMES SUCK DICK as a genre.
March 4 2016
Wages Drop...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
93,688,000 Americans Not in Labor Force...
http://cnsnews.com/news/articl...
Deficit with China GROWS...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wir...
Exports hit 5-1/2-year low...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wir...
ROGERS: 100% Probability of Recession...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
Gold soars into bull market as growth fears mount...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/bus...
"Today's news"
JOBS, JOBS: FEB +242,000, 4.9%...
Intel has already done the heavy lifting by giving us the Thunderbolt standard that can expose a 40Gbit (or more if you gang connectors) external interface that can transport PCIe to a GPU in a seamless manner.
If AMD wants to work on making the enclosures, cooling, and power supplies more standardized to make plugging in a wide range of GPUs easy then that's great. If they get all NIH and think they can gin up some proprietary connector instead of just using Thunderbolt then you can forget about this entire announcement right now.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
if only express card breakout boxes existed for single link pci-e performance and you could put a video card in, oh wait...
add in the newer high speed buses and breakout boxes...
problem was already solved
Agree with all of the above. The internal political workings at DotSlash(tm) are of interest to the community... and there needs to be discussion, details, secrets, leaks of the photos of staff screwing goats, etc. This sort of stuff is far more interesting than the 5 daily postings of the FBI unlocking the iPhone shit. This site's primary purpose seems to have become aggregating news about the Apple encryption saga.
Having the GPU external would decrease cooling needs in the main system as well as me not having to fish cables around a big card with a fridge stuck to the side of it that barely fits in the case. Implementing this properly is a biggie so yeah. Almost should just be the docking stations some computers used to have from the sound of things.
Of course they do. And nVidia wants to standardize as well. Unfortunately, they each want their own proprietary scheme to be the standard, so it ain;t gonna happen.
Cue the obligatory xkcd about standards.
One of my users was on a big gray Mac Pro, with a fiber card to access the SAN and an AJA card that puts video on the preview/client preview monitors - it's a video card, but a really strange one that acts more as a codec than a traditional video card.
When that machine became a crash-fest I moved him over to a newer Mac Pro trashcan. That fiber card and AJA card can't be put in the trashcan as it lacks PCIe slots. So I got this Magma Thunderbolt PCIe housing. That AJA card working in there beautifully. I doubt the Quadro Pro from his old system would work in that thing (it might - I may have to experiment one day) but I have little doubt a budget GeForce card would work in there.
I could totally plug my ThinkPad W540 into that box and just about any of the newer Macbooks in the building accomplishing what this article is all about.
Still - intentional and standardized would be nice. Especially with all these Mac people in my building - it would be nice to have GPU's in the Thunderbolt monitors we have floating around - it could save us money when buying laptops if we didn't have to worry about which laptop went to who as long as the monitor was able to handle the job.
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So what this sounds like to me is a standardized docking station.
Just put a standard connector in a standard location that passes through the VESA Local Bus (or whatever newfangled thing is popular these days). Then have a docking station with a card slot, install a standard desktop video card, and you're all set. This lets AMD (and others) sell video cards to end users of laptops just like they have always done for desktops.
Now where this could get really interesting is if they do this right, and create something that ends up getting applied not just to laptops, but to tablets and phones.
Proprietary tech under Apple lock and key is not - and frankly should never be even proposed as - a solution to any question or challenge regarding PC design, especially when you're talking about specifying new standards: you might as well suggest using code SCO thinks it wrote while you're at it.
No, the answer when specifying new standards is... to develop NEW standards the whole industry can use, and as the developing body, you get to benefit from leading the charge and being on top. Proprietary hardware and software designs is why Apple's major market today is cellphones, not computers: if they should choose to open the spec for Thunderbolt, that would be one thing, but until then, AMD should be looking for other solutions to this question, such as a dual-link utilizing two USB3 ports, or perhaps a USB3 and eSATA port, both of which are already mature technologies commonly available on many PC's and even laptops.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
I'd just like to add to your extremely insightful comment that anecdotal evidence is clearly the way forward when determining the global demand for something.
Lately they're going for all these crazy niches and "next big things" that usually works out to either being a flop or if it's big, then nVidia can just stroll in from behind with a product once the market is mature. Like an ITX size 175W graphics card and so on. Even when they "win" like with Mantle nobody really cares until it becomes a standard like DirectX12 or Vulkan. Like this, I'm sure AMD will use a ton of money on the standardization effort, then nVidia will come and say "that's neat, here's Maxwell/Pascal in a box" and walk away with 80%+ of the market AMD built up.
And for all those hoping for VR to save the day, it rode the 3D TV hype wave. Now consumers have mostly rejected it and 4K is all the rage, people don't like wearing glasses and helmets even less. And Google Glass totally failed to make the cyborg look seem cool. I think the people behind it sold out to Facebook at just the right time and really... it's a $599 accessory for people with a $1000+ computer, that should be a hint. AMD won't recover until they get back to making good CPUs/GPUs and stop flailing around from one hare-brained scheme to the next.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm in my 40's and my 'device that does it all' is my cell phone. I hardly get on my laptop anymore. This may actually bolster a case for external graphics cards through; With MS continuum and an external graphics card I could play a lot higher end games that I practically can on my phone.
Thunderbolt 3 is fierce and could do it. The issue is always market, even with standardization.
Meanwhile we have morons like Palmer Luckey attacking Apple; basically the kingmaker in pushing to market modular, externalized resources like Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C.
I don't play much either, too many real life things to get done. That doesn't mean I don't want to...
I see lots of people here commenting and bitching that this is a horrible idea. I, however, am apparently the target audience for this very device.
Right now I'm typing this up on my tiny little 10 inch netbook. I travel around the country very frequently with this thing for casual browsing from hotel to hotel. However, when I'm at the office, I have a full keyboard, mouse, and 22" monitor hooked up to this thing. Am I carrying around a bulky monitor around the country? Nope. But when I'm in the office and docked in, I have these resources available to me.
Enhanced GPUs are for far more than just gaming these days. For me, besides casual browsing on the go, the laptop also serves as a portable hard drive to dump photos on that I take with me. When I get back to the office, Lightroom and Photoshop come into play for editing. Both of these applications are now heavily GPU accelerated. While I have a decent desktop at home for editing that has a nice beefy GPU in it, it would be great to have closer to that same performance experience in the office when docked into the large screen and big keyboard/mouse.
Holy crap, 15 years of doing only this and 73 connections. That explains a whole lot.
Apparently, he is 10 years old.
http://fairlyoddparents.wikia....
But I don't think that is the Timmy we are speaking of.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Right now, I can buy an entire desktop computer with an i5-2500 on ebay for $120. For another $130, you can get a GTX 950, and the system can play any current game beautifully. So that's $250 for an entire non-half-assed gaming solution, which would be useful for many other things around the house if you choose.
Even if you have a laptop with a comparably fast CPU - chances are you don't, and why would you? - you will almost certainly pay more than $250 for the clunky breakout box that allows you to play modern games, and the overall results will be worse. So I don't see this kind of kludge making anyone very rich.
Add an external CPU. Get more cores with higher processing power.
Add external memory. (Probably not needed, several years back could have benefit.)
Add more storage. (Opps, been done forever.)
Starting to sound like a remote terminal that has access to local OS/files.
The DDR memory bus is right there, already a nice standard right beside the CPU and slots on mother boards.
Having one of these would be great for training / running your own personal neural network. Instead of beaming all of your data to a 3rd party you have the work done locally (or series of GPUs even...)
Having a store losing business means that games aren't popular? I guess that means that since HMW and BestBuy are down in business it's because nobody is interested in music or movies, too.
For PC, fewer people but physical media, but gaming is still alive and well. Like music or movies has moved towards iTunes/Play/etc, so too are most PC games on Steam or Origin.
AMD promoting a specialized connector for a third-party GPU reminds me of the short lived VESA local bus connector in the early 1990's. It became unnecessary as soon as a general purpose expansion bus (PCI) became available which was fast enough to support gaming GPUs.
With the arrival of Thunderbolt 3, it looks like AMD's idea is pretty much dead on arrival.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
This will have important knock-on effects for virtualisation users, as they will have to improve the drivers to support hotplug, which will allow virtual machine desktops to be migrated, where they are currently pinned due to requirements to have a physical GPU mapped through pcie virtualisation.
Right now, I use several virtual desktops, but the two I use for CAD running Windows and Linux are pinned to a specific host and GPU, and I lose the functionality of snapshots and migration, effectively reducing my kvm systems functionality to that of a primitive LPAR. If the drivers were to support GPU hotplug, then I could simply "unplug" the GPU, save the system state, and everything would work like all my other VMs.
I don't really need or care about external GPUs for my notebook, but I'm enthusiastic about the hotplug support they'll need to add.
-puddingpimp
I'm having a really hard time figuring out any usability benefits?
- Laptop-oriented gamers typically want a gaming laptop because they play their games in a variety of locations. So now, if I want to play Civ on a break at the coffeeshop I have to lug a giant ugly box around and look like that guy from the meme with the full desktop at Arby's? As a member of this category, I can assure AMD that I'll never buy unless you somehow cancel all the other lines of discrete GPU laptops.
- Laptop Users + Desktop gamers lose all the benefits of a desktop, such as a large screen and a full size keyboard, and take on the desktop's largest negative feature - non-portability. And if the Razer is any indication, it costs more to get this less functional set up. And they could have just bought a budget laptop for their work use.
Unless someone creates a way to make the GPU box as non-intrusive as the laptop itself, I don't ee this ever being compelling.
I'm sure it's been considered but at least from a programming perspective I'd be more concerned about the latency on the port as regards the ability to process realtime high framerate graphics through there. When I was doing CUDA programming the most difficult (that is, time consuming) part was getting data from main memory to the graphics card. Would the Thunderbolt interface be as fast at shuttling data from main memory to an external graphics card? 40Gbps is great and all, but is the latency low enough?
There are a lot of people out there with laptops, All In Ones, and small form factor desktops out there who are stuck with crummy integrated graphics. They have no way to add a bigger power supply or a giant two slot PCI-E graphics card, so a solution like this would be a godsend to them! Plug it in when you want to play PC games, and leave it disconnected when you want to be portable.
So, where do I buy one?
But the last one I bought sucked. I bought a better Nvidia card and it's so much easier to set up, and cross platform works better.
He was part of Dice, he came in with them and left with them.
When BizX bought Slashdot, they brought only a portion of the existing Slashdot staff with them. That included one of the three editors and one of the four engineers. I'm not sure about the other departments. I'd guess they intended to fill those roles with people from their own organization, but I don't know anything about how they're going about it.
I never met or talked with any of the BizX folks, so I can't tell you much more than that. We editors were the bottom of the decision-making totem pole for the site, so I didn't know about the acquisition until it was done.
Even if I'm no longer affiliated, I still love the site and the community. I'll keep contributing until I see good reason not to.
Yes, I've found another job -- I start on Monday, actually. Really looking forward to it. :)
Negative; I started at Slashdot in December, 2007. Dice didn't buy it until Fall 2012.
Apple do own the IP to the Lightning connector though.
You want to make it a standard?
Don't encumber it with patents.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Good luck and best wishes
...AMD cant manage driver support for the life of the laptop.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
I'm into data science and machine learning. GPUs = the only game in town. However, I need to use laptops for a lot of my computing, and buying a dedicated machine learning box can be very expensive, usually non-mobile, and super task-specific. If I could buy a decent external GPU, I would totally happy spend $1000 on the thing. I'd probably also use it to play games occasionally. Scientific computing is really something that needs the ability to add GPU grunt to the processing.
Wow, someone being nice on Slashdot. :).
My hat is off to you, sir
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
Thanks for posting! Congrats on the new job!
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